Hole Punched
by inkvoices
Summary: For Doctor Lanie Parish the real crazy call outs were the ones with the crazy live people.   Castle/Doctor Who crossover


**Author Note: **Originally written for a prompt on comment_fic at livejournal.

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><p><span>Hole Punched<span>

Doctor Lanie Parish was used to call outs at crazy times. What she still wasn't used to were the crazy call outs. Not the ones when the victim was in an odd place or position, when they were wearing bizarre clothes, or the circumstances were strange. The real crazy call outs were the ones with the crazy live people.

Esposito nodded at her in welcome and she gave him a small smile as he and Ryan herded a man in a tweed jacket and a redheaded girl away from the body draped across the sofa.

"Couldn't you have worn that police outfit?" the man was saying, waving a green laser pointer around in the air like some kind of demented professor. "Maybe if we just made an attempt to fit in -"

"This is _America_," the redhead snapped at him. "Whole different outfit _and_ some of us have had practise at fitting in over here, being chased by the Silence and the FBI, thank you very much. You're the one that's crap at it!"

"FBI?" said Esposito immediately.

Lanie ignored them in favour of getting on with her job.

The evidence collectors were on their way out, so she just pulled on a pair of gloves and moved towards the body, careful to keep her shoes out of the blood splatter. Beckett glanced at her from where she was questioning a tall, skinny guy next to the sofa, with Castle hovering as per usual.

"Has he been moved?" Lanie asked her.

The angles didn't look right.

"Rory here," said Beckett, "turned over our victim to see if he was still alive and could be helped. Apparently."

"Look," said Rory, taking a step forward. He spoke with an English accent, like the other two, and had smears on the lower half of his t-shirt where he'd obviously wiped blood off of his hands. "I'm a nurse."

"And you couldn't tell that the man with a huge hole all the way through his chest and out the other side was dead _without_ moving the body?" said Lanie, raising her eyebrows.

"Stranger things have happened," he muttered.

"Not a nurse I'd want to have," said Castle, bending over the victim and holding out his hand over the gaping wound, trying to gauge the size of it. "Guess they train people differently on the other side of the Atlantic."

Lanie knocked his hand away with the back of her wrist and reached into the hole, pressing around the edges with her gloved fingers.

"Eleven point three centimetres in diameter, no scorch marks, clean cut edges," said the professor seeming to pop up from nowhere to lean over the back of the sofa. "Also, comfy chair, but I don't think you'll manage to get the stains out."

She raised her head slowly to look up at him.

"Have you seen anything like this before?"

"Well no, not in person," he said cheerfully, "but sometimes it's wonderful when things aren't what you expect them to be."

"Please tell me you didn't think that this was something to do with River," said Rory, coming to stand next to him. "When you said we were going looking for my daughter, tracking her by following a trail of bloody murders was not what I had in mind."

Lanie peeked at Beckett out of the corner of her eye, noticed the detective stealthily reaching for her gun, and started to back away. Live people were not in her job description, especially the crazy ones. It was bad enough having to deal with Castle (even if he had grown on all of them; Beckett most of all if she'd ever admit it).

"She is _not_ a murdering psychopath," said the redhead.

She shook off Ryan's hold and moved to join the other civilians. Ryan let her, obviously thinking that it was better to have all the crazy people in one part of the room.

"Okay, maybe River isn't," said Rory as the redhead put her hands on her hips and glared at him.

"Neither is Melody!"

"I'm just saying: dead bodies."

Beckett drew her gun, holding it aligned with her leg and pointing down.

"There's something strange flagging up related to an FBI investigation in the late sixties," said Esposito pushing Castle back behind him and standing next to Beckett.

"Alright," said Beckett, finally pointing her gun at the odd trio. "Drop the laser, hands where I can see 'em. Ryan, make sure they're not carrying. They're coming to the station with us."

Three sets of hands shot into the air at once, as if the owners were trained synchronised swimmers.

"How come if you hate guns so much they always seem to show up around us?" the redhead said the professor in annoyance.

"Amy," he replied slowly, his eyes fixed on Beckett, "less talking would be good right now please."

"Are you alright?" asked Esposito as Ryan, Beckett, and two uniformed cops removed the civilians from the room.

Lanie took a deep breath, ignoring the odour of decomposing body, and rolled her shoulders casually, trying to relax.

"Of course. Why wouldn't I be?"

Esposito smiled at her and replaced his gun. She hadn't even noticed that he'd drawn it.

"Which doesn't mean that I don't still prefer the dead, mind you."

He placed a hand on her shoulder and squeezed gently, still smiling.

"Okay then. I'll leave you to it."

~11~

"Dare I ask," said Beckett as she walked into the morgue.

"Eleven point three centimetres in diameter, no scorch marks, clean cut edges," Lanie replied. "As to what caused it? No idea. It's like a solid cylinder of something was just punched straight though him. Have you asked your crazy professor man about it?"

Beckett walked over to the body, placing her hands behind her back, and looked through the hole in the victim's chest to the steel of the table below.

"He says he's a doctor, but he won't give us a name and we can't find any records of him, apart from a few notes that slipped through the FBI secrecy net about a possible intrusion at the White House in 1969, which is ridiculous because he couldn't have even been born back then."

"Well this guy is a bit less mysterious."

Lanie touched the victim on the wrist in acknowledgement without thinking about it, her gloved hand leaving no trace of herself behind, before moving to her notes, making sure she got the details absolutely right.

"Sean Matherson, twenty-eight, diabetic. Solder burns on his hands, so you might want to check if that's anything to do with where he works. Other than that, no alcohol or drugs in his system, nothing noteworthy."

"Just a hole."

"Right the way through." Lanie pulled off her gloves and dropped them in the hazardous waste disposal unit. "What about the other two?"

"The girl is a kissogram, currently unemployed. The nurse actually is a registered nurse and he seems the sanest of the lot, until you watch the three of them together and you realise just how twisted up he is with them.

"As in _together_ together?" said Lanie curiously.

Beckett sighed.

"I don't know, I don't want to know, and I just want this case to be over."

"What about Castle?" Lanie asked as Beckett headed for the door. 'I don't see him cluttering up my morgue."

Beckett rubbed a hand across her face tiredly.

"He bought them pizza and now they're discussing time travel."

~11~

It was late when Lanie heard Espositio getting back. She shoved two meals in the microwave before going to meet him. Kissing him at the door with her hands pushed up under his shirt was a much more satisfying hello then they could exchange whilst on the job.

"You didn't cook, did you?" he asked as the smell of chicken curry started to waft out from the kitchen.

"No chance," she said, slipping her hands out of his shirt and giving him a hug before forcing herself to move away. "I've got better things to do with my time. Now come eat."

"I love the way you think." Esposito shrugged off his jacket, hanging it on the back of the chair before sitting down. "You would not believe the craziness that has been my day."

"I heard FBI, kissogram, and time travel."

"Trust me, it didn't get any better.

Lanie didn't ask, just let him eat, because she knew full well that he wasn't meant to talk about active cases and besides, they had better things to do with their time.

~11~

It's Tuesday morning when Lanie gets a call out for a dead body dressed as Dracula impaled on the sticky-out arch bit of a church. Admittedly it is the day after Halloween.

Esposito stands under a tree, trying to shelter from the drizzling rain as he phones for a mobile crane, or something else that'll allow them to reach the victim. He nods at her and she smiles back as she tucks her hands in her pockets to keep them warm.

"Do you think he flew up there?" says Castle as he passes Beckett a hot cup of takeaway coffee. "Or was flying and fell? Ooo, maybe he was shot down!"

"Where's mine?" says Lanie, but he ignores her.

She grins at Beckett who rolls her eyes in reply. Lanie keeps telling her that takeaway coffee is part of courtship these days, but Beckett is having none of it.

"Face it, Castle," says Beckett, "there are such things as logical explanations."

"Hey, stranger things have happened.

"Speaking of which," says Lanie, "what did happen to that ever-so-helpful nurse and his little friends from the last case?"

Beckett and Castle share a look. It's the kind of look that tells the other person volumes without letting anyone else in. Then again it says a fair bit to Lanie as well, like the fact that the courtship has probably gone a bit beyond coffee.

"Spoilers," says Castle and he grins.

"We don't talk about it," says Becket, turning away and sipping her coffee. "They were insane, they helped us catch a killer, and that was it. Although," she adds, tilting her head back to look at Dracula, "it'll be a while before I think of any other case as crazy again."


End file.
